Rajasthan is another state which has been at the forefront of many innovations in strengthening NREGA. This is hardly surprising given that Rajasthan is the home of the movement for the right to information and employment guarantee. Yet, while Rajasthan has been relatively successful in curbing obvious corruption, poor management and weak delivery structures have contributed to serious inefficiencies in the actual delivery of NREGA. One critical fallout of this is that labourers are unable to access the minimum wage despite putting in a full eight hours of work — the average NREGA beneficiary earned a meagre Rs 51 per day in 2006-2007 even though the statutory minimum wage for the state is Rs 73.

The reasons for this are complex. To begin with, the general practice in wage employment programmes is for payments to be made on the basis of the ‘task’ performed, or the total output per day. So if an NREGA labourer is working on a worksite to extract gravel for building a road, her daily rate is determined on the basis of the total quantum of gravel extracted through the day. To manage this process, a junior engineer — usually a block level officer — is assigned the task of taking measurements at the worksite and on that basis calculating the total wage due. It is, of course, impossible for the junior engineer to make daily visits to each worksite in his area of jurisdiction and he usually waits till the work is completed before taking measurements. A great amount of secrecy surrounds this calculation process. Consequently, the individual labourer is never quite aware of the correlation between individual work done and wages received. This encourages free riders — after all, what incentive would you have to work if you knew that your wages depended on the output of hundred others? As a result productivity suffers and minimum wages rarely received.

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